How well does JWM perform on gender equity?

The equity gap between men and women persists in many realms of the wildlife profession. But recent data has revealed that more women are publishing peer-reviewed studies in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

“We generally found that the number of women authors has increased over time, which is great,” said TWS member Rebeca Becdach, a master’s student at the California Polytechnic State University, Humboldt. “But we’re still not where we want to be.”

Becdach and her supervisor at the university, TWS member and biologist Ho Yi Wan, have been interested in exploring ways to increase access and participation in the wildlife profession for underrepresented individuals.

Wan was curious about how the gender gap might be represented in the publication history of the Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM), one of The Wildlife Society’s journals. He worked with an undergraduate student, Kellie Crouch, to compile data on all the authors of studies published in the journal from 1999 to 2020. The team then ran these names through genderize.io, an online program that determines the likely gender of a first name as well as the percentage of accuracy.

Becdach and her colleagues published a review recently in the Journal of Wildlife Management, where they analyzed the data that Crouch began working on to determine what the journal’s gender skew was and how it has changed over time.

To avoid misattributing genders to names, they only counted author names that the program classified with a certainty of 80% or more.

How has gender representation changed?

The analysis revealed that 25 years ago, the gender of published authors was skewed a lot more toward men. There were only about 14 women for every 100 men as first authors and about 12 women for every 100 men as co-authors.

However, this vastly changed over the years. From 2015 to 2020, there were about 60 women for every 100 men listed as first authors and about 30 women for every 100 men listed as co-authors.

“Since the early 2000s, we’ve definitely made improvements,” Becdach said. But she added that the number has pretty much plateaued, not improving much over the last half decade of the study.

The researchers also analyzed the affiliations of the authors. They found that the number of women authors from all kinds of institutions increased, whether governmental, academic, nonprofit or private consultancies.

Becdach and her colleagues also saw an increase in women authors publishing on all taxa of wildlife studied in JWM by the end of the study compared to 1999. In fact, when it came to studies on amphibians or invertebrates, more women were first authors than men in the latter half of the study period. But Becdach noted that this might just be due to a small sample size, at least with invertebrates—there were only 13 authors studying invertebrates compared to the thousands of authors they analyzed overall.

Becdach credits groups like TWS’ Women of Wildlife Community and efforts to include more women in TWS conferences and get women involved more generally in the profession as reasons why the gender skew has improved over the years. Having plenty of women mentors can also help younger women get into the profession, Becdach said.

But women also continue to face barriers. “There are unconscious biases when hiring women,” Becdach said. Other problems may relate to the ways that women are raised in society—their families may not introduce them to wildlife, the outdoors and natural resources as much as men. There are also societal expectations based on gender and caretaking responsibilities often fall to women.

In addition, men hold many of the higher positions in the profession. This may take longer to change because people in these positions tend to stick around for longer periods of time. The positive side of this, Becdach said, is that many women hold positions that could eventually lead to higher ones.  

This article features research that was published in a TWS peer-reviewed journal. Individual online access to all TWS journal articles is a benefit of membership. Join TWS now to read the latest in wildlife research.